Way to go, Marketeers and Wannabe-Spammers

Looks like times are hard. The last view weeks I've increasingly received e-mail advertising from companies whose customer I was once a long time ago. Quite often I hardly remember what the product was or when I bought it. Seems that now they remember that they have those mail lists around and... "why don't we spam them a bit, since we have them?"

Most of them seem to be pretty aware that what they'll mostly get is annoyed people. Hey, we're dealing with this "spam" thing for such a long time that most people consider it "spam" even if it isn't UCE (unsolicited comercial email). Sensing this, these companies usually feature an unsubscribe link popular on top. There are some who even turn it around, they send one mail that asks you to confirm that you want to receive marketing mails. When DynDNS tried that, it probably didn't work out the way they expected: So they sent 2 or 3 reminders behind it, to notify me that I really won't receive any mails if I don't react.

Today's mail (that triggered this post) was from a company called Prosoft Engineering. They make a program called "Data Rescue" (which recovers deleted and formatted data on Macintosh HFS disks, good thing). I think we've bought that thing in the company once a long time ago in an emergency. Well, the funny thing with the marketing spam from Prosoft Engineering was, that it said:

Please reconfirm your interest in receiving email from us. If you
do not wish to receive any more emails, you can unsubscribe here
Confirm URL
h..p://ProsoftEngineering.bmdedamails9.com...

So, there it is, what everybody searches at first sight: The unsubscribe link. But click on it and you'll get a screen saying "Email address confirmed". Uh, that's not what we wanted... look again. The text says that you can unsubscribe here, but then right following is the "confirm" URL. The "unsubscribe" URL is at the end of the mail. Their "marketing" department will be happy to have a lot of "confirmed" mail addresses... with lots of very annoyed mail recipients on the next mass mailing they send out.

Also funny is the use of a throwaway domain, registered to some random company. They probably expect this domain to land on various black lists and don't want to get their proper company domain in trouble. Way to go, wannabe-spammers from Prosoft Engineering.

Life in Athens (Greece) for a foreigner from the other side of the mountains.
And with an interest in digital life and the feeling of change in a big city.
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